That's not much for any modern server so I genuinely don't understand the frustration. I'm pretty certain gitea should be able to handle thousands of read requests per minute (not per hour) without even breaking a sweat.
Also: Anubis and go-away, but also: some people are on old browsers or underpowered computers.
One time, sure. But unauthenticated requests would surely be cached, authenticated ones skip the cache (just like HN works :) ), as most internet-facing websites end up using this pattern.
Saying “just cache this” is not sustainable. And this is only one repository; the only reasonable way to deal with this is some sort of traffic mitigation, you cannot just deal with the traffic as the happy path.